How does one become infected by the love of flowers and growing things?

   Could it be the pure desire to see things grow?  Is it the science of how plants convert sunlight into food?  Is it the endless variety of shapes and sizes, or the rainbow  palette of colors?  Or as my mother claims it was an innate desire to smell the posies when she was inspecting the peonies in the  backyard when she started to feel labor pains at my impending delivery….

Whatever the reason -for myself, it has been a life long pursuit of creating and collecting plants and flowers that bring forth a smile, a hug from a friend or loved one when they receive a bouquet or arrangement that stokes the desire to plant another seed or cutting in anticipation of another flower.

When flowers  bloom,  it is an expression of life and promise of nature’s creativity to keep on despite the late frost, the blight, or hard rains that threaten to upend the hard work one puts into growing and farming.

   Farming, as it was back in Iowa,  seemed never to end for my friends growing up on farms.  I had the “luxury” of living in town and only helped out during the summers to make money for future school.  I planned and poured over the seed catalogues every winter to pick out what I wanted to grow in my flower beds and vegetable garden at the house we lived in.   There was the old retired couple next door that probably gave me the most incentive and desire to grow flower by producing seemingly the most monsterous bearded iris I’d ever seen.

Clara Knutson had a knack for growing flowers and I’d run over to her yard under the arbor of bittersweet to see what new was growing and blooming as often as I could.  It didn’t hurt that she also baked the worlds best cinnamon rolls on the planet but it still was a treat to smell what seemed to me to be the most intoxicating fragrance around which was  those iris.

Flowers are one of those things in life that give meaning to our mundane lives.

  They are fleeting, and by their very nature begin to die the moment they are cut from the plant, yet that is also the very reason we value them so much.  It shows us that simple pleasures such as a flower fragrance or the mix of colors in the throat of a flower are to be cherished and given to create happiness in other’s lives.

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